You wouldn't go to a networking event with a paper bag over your head !

So why,  why, why do people not have a photo on their  linkedin profile ?

No photo on your linkedin profile - a missed opportunity, was a discussion I started on linkedin last month. After 50 or so replies/comments there is a groundswell of opinion that says no photo  =  A  MASSIVE missed opportunity.

 Below is a selection of comments :

1) Maybe they have something to hide ?

 2) I want to see who I am talking to (even in cyberspace)

3) People like to see other people. It adds some credibility and potential customers like to have a picture of a face  rather than a faceless company

4)  I also feel that if someone isn’t willing to show the real them then I don’t see why I should connect with them or support them with feedback and ideas.

5)  A photo definitely adds credibility - people like - and need - to see who they are dealing with. People buy people NOT products and first impressions count....it only takes a matter of seconds for people to make a number of judgements about another person...and that's before they even open their mouth!

6) I always think that no photo means a lack of commitment to LinkedIn - i.e. you can't be bothered. Why would someone take the trouble to connect with someone when they haven't filled in their details?

7) Having a photo also helps with recognition if you're looking to build relationships. If you've been to a networking event and collected a number of business cards from people you want to connect with online, having a photo can help them identify or recognise you and they are then (hopefully) more likely to accept your invitation.

 So there you have it  - you wouldn't have a brown paper bag covering your face when you were at a networking event - would you ?

What you waiting for - aim, click and  upload that photo now  !

PS - Thank you to all of you @ South Wales Business Contacts (linkedin group) who contributed to the debate and gave me such a rich source of material.

Ouch, wow, recovery - the Tesco way

My ten year old's face said it all !

We'd been told to bring the bike, we'd purchased from Tesco, back to them on the Monday  and that someone would assemble it. (Spot the crap dad with no DIY skills !)

So at 17.30 my wife rang " he's wanting to know when you'll be back to take the bike to Tesco".  "10 minutes" I said. 10 minutes later I was greeted by an enthusiastic cry of " Daddy" as I put the key in the front door.

A few minutes later I spotted a Tesco Manager close to their bike shop. I approached him  and  explained that we'd been told to bring the bike down for assembly. " Really sorry sir, but Dale is on holiday for 2 weeks" was the reply. My 10 year old's face said it all - his head dropped and he looked sooooo soooo sad ! Ouch !

It was suggested I go to customer services and ask them to phone the Newport store as they had a bike shop. The lady on customer services did this and she was told that as long as we got the bike there that evening they would  be able to look at it.

20 minutes later we were at the bike shop in Tesco Newport. A Manager came over to us and and said she was really sorry but that the bike shop closed 20 minutes ago. Double ouch !!  She apologised to us on behalf of Tesco and was sorry  that we'd been given incorrect information. She said she'd spoken to the Cardiff Store Manager and that he was happy to reimburse our petrol costs.

By this point we'd picked out a set of lights and a water bottle for the bike. "I'll charge those to Cardiff  and you can have them" she said.  Things were improving.

" Where do you live ?" She asked next. " I can take the bike in the back of my car to the Pengham Green Store in Cardiff tomorrow, when it has been assembled , to save you coming over to Newport". Blimey, result. " Yes please if you're sure" I said.  WOW & recovery !

Such a great example of two things
1) An individual going the extra mile - thanks Sian  at Tesco Newport
2) Ouch, Wow &; Recovery.

Research shows that customers whose problems are resolved are much more likely to stay loyal & to tell their friends how the organisation redeemed itself.

I'm still gobsmacked at the service that Sian  gave us. It really did turn a bad situation round, At the moment Tesco can do no wrong !

Me & my new mate @MikejulietBravo (a tale of the power and reach of social media)

The green green grass of home was calling and from the 21:15 Paddington to Swansea train I tweeted " Just leaving London Paddington - please no delays FGW, it's been a tough week".

It had been a hell of a week, 2 days training in Swansea then 2 days in Luton arriving at around 22:00 at the hotel to run a 2 day course the following day. but now it was nearly over and I was homeward bound.

I tweeted as I counted the stations down: Reading, Didcot Parkway and Swindon. It was all going to time. I would be back in Cardiff at around 23:30.

" Ladies and gentlemen this is your train manager speaking" oh oh, I had tweeted too soon. I can't remember the reason for the delay or anything like that. Back to tweetdeck to post something about FGW, when I noticed a tweet from someone who follows me. "stuck outside Bristol Parkway".

"Are we on the same train?" I tweeted.

"Yes" came back the reply. We'd never met before but somehow had ended up following each other on Twitter.

"Shall I come and say hello?" he tweeted. So 2 minutes later we were shaking hands, exchanging pleasantries and business cards. He was travelling to Swansea.

I hope to get to know @MikeJulietBravo a bit better but in the meantime I wanted to share this with you as I thought it showed the power and reach of social media and that was going to be the

end of this blog posting. However ..............

Last Wednesday I was travelling back from Doncaster and got off at Bristol Parkway at 21:30 for the final leg of my journey back across the bridge. Walked into the waiting room, turned round to see @MJB coming through the door. The next hour gave us a chance to get to know each other a bit better and he has invited me to join his network.

Do you know what, I think me & @MikeJulietBravo are going to become friends & all thanks to social media !

What if Mary Portas met Jose Arrogante ?

You've got to hand it to Mary “Queen of Shops” Portas and now the “Secret Shopper”(on Channel 4) – she knows her stuff and talks a lot of sense.

In week one she took on the fast clothes retailers and convinced the owner of Pilot to “try something different” (to borrow a line from Sainsburys). I missed the second week where she did battle with the furniture retailers – the like of DFS I guess. I loved what she did at the Angel Fonehouse branch – long overdue is the idea that you should be able to try before you buy a mobile phone !

In week 4 she tackled the Estate Agents and to be honest I was sceptical that she'd be able to pull this one off but yet again I thought she nailed it !

Have I told you about my mate, let's call him Pete, who is an estate agent ? Anyway, I have this great drive to share with others, stuff that I think is good. So I rang him about an hour before the programme went out & suggested he watch it, thinking it might generate some ideas for him.

Myself Pete & his wife, and a few others all met up on Saturday night to celebrate my wife's birthday.

“So Pete – what did you think of the programme? “ I asked.

“ I didn't watch some journalist scapegoating our industry” (or words to that effect was his ill informed reply). I resisted the temptation to explain to him who Mary Portas was.

I persevered “she was saying through the public that basically all estate agents were dishonest Pete. She worked with a particular London agent on drafting property details that were honest and in plain English and avoided terms like a prestigious turning”

Now, did any of you ever watch the fastshow ? In the last series there was a foreign football manager called Jose Arrogante who was based on Mourinho (the then Chelsea Manager)
Mourinho is now doing his own brand of the special one at Real Madrid, but the problem is that there is a new Jose Arrogante and he is called Pete.

In reply he said “The thing is John, i've been in the estate agency business for over 27 years” and to paraphrase him, he can't be taught something by an upstart journalist.

I wonder how the conversation would go if Jose (sorry Pete) met Mary ?

Social media should I get on the bus ?

Do the numbers speak for themselves ?

•Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
•If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.*
•80% of companies use, (or are planning to use), LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching its 45-millionth membership.
•Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week.
•It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
•Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
•The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period.
•It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
•The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
•According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.
•The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.
•Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
•Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
•Universal McCann reports that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.
(source e-consultancy.com)

Can you afford not to get on the bus ?

Employee engagement - can we be bothered ?

The phone is ringing it's 4.57, my shift ends at 5.00. Do I answer it or let it ring ? The answer is, it depends !

If i'm someone who is emotionally connected and buys into their organisational vision then yes, but if i'm someone who just shows up everyday but isn't present then the answer is no. Why is it that one person buys into the vision and culture and another doesn't ?

To answer that question we have to start by being clear about what we're talking about here. In the parlance of the HR world what we are descibing above is all about employee engagement or the lack of it. But what does that mean ? According to the Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD) " It can be seen as a combination of commitment to the organisation and its values plus a willingness to help out colleagues (organisational citizenship). It goes beyond job satisfaction and is not simply motivation. Engagement is something the employee has to offer: it cannot be ‘required’ as part of the employment contract"

Why should employers be concerned about levels of engagement ? "If an organisation wants to come out of the recession and attract the best staff, then employee engagement has to be a factor they focus on. It’s a strategic imperative. Employee engagement directly affects customer service, financial performance and the future well-being of the organisation.”( HRzone) " So that's the business case written !

In a future blog I plan to talk about what organisations can do to improve employee engagement but that's for another day.

So why is it some people are engaged and others are not ? Let's assume the person who would answer the phone and the person who wouldn't had joined the company on the same day and received the same induction day. When they joined they were surely both motivated, keen, eager to learn and develop with their new organisation ? So what's gone wrong since day one ? They had the same training, they did the same job, worked the same hours and earnt about the same. The only difference was that they had different managers.

According to research by Gallup people don't leave organisations they leave managers. So the reason that one of them isn't engaged is down to his or her manager ? Surely it can't be that simple ? Applying Mcgregor's Theory X stereotype, perhaps the non engaged employee is inherently lazy ? There must be more to it than this ?

I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts.

Coaching it's isotonic

A story in the February edition of People Management headlined " Coaching boosts people skills at accountancy firm" caught my eye recently. Actually it did more than just catch my eye it made me feel all warm inside. After all, if a hardnosed bottomline focused business like Grant Thornton invests in its people then there must be something in it surely ?

Well, according to the HR Director a firm "is only as good as its people", now i'm really excited to read these words ! " The Partners will become qualified coaches to mentor junior partners and senior managers to support their career development" continues the HR Director.

This was particulary pleasing as recent research by the ILM (Insitute of Leadership and Management) showed that employers weren't making time for training. The biggest barriers were cost and time. Then a week or so after that,Toyota admits that a lack of training caused its current problems (What a fantastic business case for investing in learning and development by the way !)

Why not put people through an MBA, or an ILM Level 7 Management qualification instead ? Coaching is fluffy isn't it ? Interestingly enough there is research that indicates that coaching provides a decent return on investment, although figures vary. The role of the coach is not to solve the coachees problems but to help them solve them through questioning and listening. It's a bit like the proverb about a man who learns to fish, he will never be hungry again. This is what makes coaching so powerful, it empowers people in an incredible way.

So, given that employee engagement has fallen off a cliff in the last 18 months and that we are, hopefully, exiting the recession - will the next Grant Thornton step forward. Go ahead make my day.